For the Whitney’s Move, Boxes and Burly Men Just Won’t Do

Anyone who has ever unwrapped a chipped piece of Wedgwood understands the headaches and peril associated with moving.

Now imagine what the Whitney Museum of American Art is going through as it plans to transport more than 14,000 items, including delicate pieces like Alexander Calder’s sculpture “Circus” and landmark paintings like Edward Hopper’s “Early Sunday Morning” — to its new downtown home.

Let’s just say the logistics go well beyond buying some Bubble Wrap.

There are intricate packing and crating concerns, matters of truck scheduling and insurance and, of course, security, as artwork worth hundreds of millions of dollars is transported through Manhattan. When the Barnes Foundation moved its museum to Philadelphia from the suburbs for its 2012 opening, the movers, as a precaution, stripped all the signage from their trucks.

“Everything about it is monumental,” said Ron Simoncini, who was the director of security at the Museum of Modern Art when that institution moved to and from temporary quarters in Queens during its 2004 renovation. (The move from Manhattan took 400 truck trips and involved about 100,000 works of art, MoMA said.)

“It’s not like moving a business or moving a home,” Mr. Simoncini added. “It’s not like you call Staples.”

The Whitney’s transfer from its Upper East Side home at Madison and 75th Street to Gansevoort and Washington Streets in the meatpacking district is still a ways off.

The museum will shut down after its Jeff Koons retrospective closes on Oct. 19, and staff members will start moving into the new building in the fall. The art will be transported after that, so that the museum is ready for its spring opening. (A firm date has not been set.)

“We’re still making plans for the actual moving of art,” Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney’s director, said in an interview last week.

The new $760 million project, at the base of the High Line, designed by Renzo Piano, is entering the final stages of construction. (Members of the news media are to get a look at its progress on Thursday.)

Mr. Weinberg said it was not yet clear how many trucks will be involved, how many trips they will take and when they will begin pulling up to the new museum; those details will not be released even when they are determined, because of security concerns.

The Whitney, however, is no stranger to moving, Mr. Weinberg said; the downtown location will be its fourth. Founded in 1930, the museum opened on West Eighth Street in 1931, then moved to an expanded site on West 54th Street in 1954 and finally to its current building, which was designed by Marcel Breuer and opened in 1966.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art signed an agreement in 2011 to occupy the Breuer building for at least eight years.

Mr. Weinberg said he is excited at the prospect of being able to put more of the Whitney’s permanent collection on view. In the new building, which includes outdoor areas, the museum will double its total exhibition space to 63,000 square feet.

It will also be able to consolidate its administrative operations; the Whitney’s staff is spread around five different locations. “We have not all been under one roof for eight years,” Mr. Weinberg said.

“It’s one set of details after another,” said Mr. Stanley, who added that he did not yet have a cost estimate.

A major part of the effort will be ensuring adequate security. The Barnes Foundation had a door-to-door private security escort. “They were invisible but they were there,” said Hal Jones, whose Philadelphia-based company, Atelier Art Services and Storage, handled the move.

“It took us a year to prepare for the job,” Mr. Jones said.

The company spent six months creating the packaging for the Barnes move. Crates were packed inside of crates. Art was insulated with specialized foam, which was customized, based on the weight of each object.

The art traveled in Atelier’s climate-controlled trucks, which are equipped with a cushioning suspension system. Not all the art went over at once, to avoid attracting attention and snarling traffic. “You couldn’t just jam up the whole place,” Mr. Jones said. About four or five trucks made several trips.

“We were like an ant trail,” Mr. Jones said. “Going and coming all the time.”

And then there was all that insurance to deal with. “We have to cover everything we do,” Mr. Jones said. “Commercial; auto for vehicles; packing insurance; shipping insurance; you need insurance for your bricks and mortar; health insurance for all your employees; you need workmen’s compensation; and you need to be able to offer insurance to clients who don’t insure their work.”

The Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York is preparing to move some of its 200,000 design objects back into the renovated Carnegie Mansion on Fifth Avenue. The security requirements won’t compare to the museum’s 2011 show on Van Cleef & Arpels (armed guards), but the move is nevertheless “a complicated Rubik’s Cube,” said Caroline Baumann, the director.

The bulk of the Whitney’s collection is works on paper, most of which will be moved to the new building’s study center. Of the remainder — paintings and sculptures — it is still unclear which pieces from the permanent collection will be installed when the Whitney reopens.

The rest of the Whitney’s collection will remain in its undisclosed off-site storage center. Because of the cost — and flood considerations — the museum decided against building a storage facility at the new site, Mr. Weinberg said.

After the Madison Avenue building closes to the public, there will be some private events there through the holidays, and then the Whitney plans to upgrade the Breuer building for its new tenant, the Met, officials said. To prepare for the move (and with support from the Henry Luce Foundation), the Whitney is thoroughly documenting its holdings to make sure each piece has been adequately conserved and digitally photographed.

“It’s basically getting your house clean before you move,” Mr. Weinberg said. “We have never gone through our entire collection, object by object.”

The reinstallation of the collection in the new galleries will be overseen by longtime members of the Whitney’s staff. However unnerving the prospect of this undertaking is, Mr. Weinberg said, he’s confident that it is in very good hands.

“They are people who are fully tested,” he said.

“They know this collection, they’ve traveled this collection,” he added. “These are their babies.”

Correction:

Because of an editing error, an article on Wednesday about the logistics of the move of the Whitney Museum of American Art from its current home on the Upper East Side to a new building in the meatpacking district misstated the cost of the building. It is $422 million — not $760 million, which is the total cost of the project, including the building, the endowment and other expenses.

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